How to Add Conflict to Your Plot: Three Easy Ways to Get Started

By Jodi Clark

Conflict is one of those things we usually try to avoid in real life. After all, it’s not fun to fight, to argue, and to strive against perspectives and situations that conflict with your beliefs and desires.

It does, however, make for an excellent story. 

Why? Because in stories, seeing people stand up to those who are doing wrong is inspiring. Seeing people striving for goodness and morality helps us to see how we can do the same in situations where we must face the darkness and overcome it with light. And finally, seeing people do hard things, seeing them struggle, seeing them lose only to get up again and again--these things remind us that even when we are faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, we can keep fighting. We can do what is right even when it hurts and when it’s scary.

I’m here to explain three different types of conflict and how you can apply them to your story to create a gripping and inspiring plot. Let’s dive right in!

A Conflict of Personalities

We’ve all seen stories where characters don’t get along. Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, Hiccup and Toothless, Legolas and Gimli, and others prove to us that some personalities just have a hard time clicking. You’ve probably experienced this yourself in your life at some time, if you’ve ever had to work with someone at a job, on a group project, or elsewhere who just got on your nerves, and vice versa. Personality conflicts are bound to happen because humans have such diverse personalities.

But where do personalities come from? The word personality means “the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character.” From that, we can gather that characteristics and qualities are essential to a personality. How do we get characteristics and qualities in real life?

Our backstories. Our psychology. Our mistakes, successes, failures, and achievements all help to define how we perceive the world and how we approach it. The people who raise us, mentor us, challenge us, and keep us going all help us to define more clearly who we are and what we will become.

Someone with an absent parent, like Tony Stark, might grow up to become an arrogant narcissist who craves attention and doesn’t care what he has to do to get it. Someone who had to struggle his whole life to do the right thing and stand up for himself, like Steve Rogers, might grow to become someone who is starkly intolerant of bullies and uses their newfound position of strength to stick strongly to their morals and rules of conduct.

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On top of everything else, Tony is an extrovert and Steve is an introvert, Tony makes seemingly reckless decisions and Steve makes more calculated ones. So, when these two characters come together, their personalities clash because of all their differences. They disagree with each other and clash mightily throughout most of the MCU.

Your Turn

A Conflict with Morality

What are morals? According to the dictionary, morals are “a person’s standards of behavior or beliefs concerning what is and is not acceptable for them to do.” Beliefs concerning what is and is not acceptable can be determined by people’s backstories, religions, and the people around them. Sometimes, what one person deems acceptable can be seen as completely unacceptable by another person even though they seemingly want the same thing.

We can see a wonderfully written moral conflict in The Lord of the Rings, especially between all the characters who want to use the Ring for different purposes. Boromir wants to use the Ring because his belief is that he must do anything to save his people, even if it means fighting evil with evil. Gollum wants to use the Ring because his belief is that the Ring is his only comfort after he was cast out of his home for murdering Deagol. Frodo wants to destroy the Ring because his belief is that the Ring is dangerous and must be eliminated so that the evil of the world won’t destroy the Shire. Faramir wants to take the Ring to his father because his belief is that the most important thing is to win his father’s approval.

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In each of these situations, you can see what each character values above all else. Boromir thinks it is right to save his people, Gollum thinks it is right to want comfort, Frodo thinks it is right to save the Shire, and Faramir thinks it is right to want his father’s approval. Each of these characters is willing to do whatever it takes to get what they believe is right, which means that each of them has different ideas of what is acceptable for them to do. They have different morals regarding the situation at hand, and because of this, their moral conflict helps spark deeper themes throughout the whole story.

These characters and their moral conflicts push questions forward to the reader to answer. These questions in The Lord of the Rings look like: “Can evil really be used to destroy evil?” and “How can those who seek to do good resist the temptation of evil?” and “How can those who have fallen prey to evil’s temptation redeem themselves? Is redemption even possible for them?”

Your Turn

A Conflict with Nature

Natural conflict is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The hero faces a conflict with nature. In this particular conflict, nature becomes the antagonist, or at least an antagonistic force in the story. It hinders the hero from accomplishing their goals (typically in a conflict with nature, the hero’s main goal is survival) and sometimes can even hurt or kill the hero or the people and things they care about.

In Call of the Wild by Jack London, the main character, a dog named Buck, is stolen from his home in California and is sent to become a sled dog in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s. Buck faces many challenges once he is out in the wild, and becomes increasingly less of a house dog and more of a wild animal in order to survive in the harsh wilderness. Buck faces harsh sledding conditions, starvation, wolf packs, and more on his journey into the wild, all these things providing increasingly large obstacles to his survival.

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*spoilers ahead*

Eventually, Buck learns how to live like a wild animal, and after a human he was very fond of is killed, he becomes the leader of a wolf pack. He achieves his goal of survival by navigating each natural obstacle that is thrown his way, and he is not the same after having gone through his adventure.

Your Turn

Conclusion

So, let’s wrap this up. There are three ways to add conflict to your story:

1. Add a personality conflict

2. Add a morality conflict

3. Add a natural conflict

Figuring out ways to add conflict to your story can be stressful, but now that you have these three tools in your writer’s toolkit, you can start writing with confidence, knowing that you’ll be using time-honored strategies to up the tension and increase the conflict in your tale.

What are some of the best-written conflicts that you’ve seen? What kind of conflict are you planning on using in your story?